JVL is not building on what most players consider a budget. His decks are just tier 2 decks with less copies of expensive cards. Half of that is the fault of the way the game is designed, but I think most budget players just want cool decks to play, not just trying to win against better decks more often. Conley is a boss at rogue decks, he could totally write that article good.

JVL is not building on what most players consider a budget. His decks are just tier 2 decks with less copies of expensive cards. Half of that is the fault of the way the game is designed, but I think most budget players just want cool decks to play, not just trying to win against better decks more often. Conley is a boss at rogue decks, he could totally write that article good.

This is a really good idea. BoaB would be quite interesting from Conley's pov.

Vedalken Entrancer is an example of what may be one of the main reasons modern art descriptions are less likely to mention what a card does. Our blue skinned wizarding friend no longer seems to have the power to cause things to 'untap' at all.

I think that both artworks can be somewhat considered unfitting. Having some flashy light to describe any magical ability is kind of generic. Heck, I didn't know the card Vedalken Dismisser so at first glance I thought I was looking at a reprint. Maybe what it needed is some context or some way to make it unique. Perhaps showing the victim or giving the character a special motion or gesture (Make the dissmisser look like he's really dissmissing or the entrancer like he's really entrancing).

And for those who haven't seen Vedalken Entrancer's art close-up before, take a second, closer look at his squiggly chest wrap. Notice anything unusual?

I think that both artworks can be somewhat considered unfitting. Having some flashy light to describe any magical ability is kind of generic. Heck, I didn't know the card Vedalken Dismisser so at first glance I thought I was looking at a reprint. Maybe what it needed is some context or some way to make it unique. Perhaps showing the victim or giving the character a special motion or gesture (Make the dissmisser look like he's really dissmissing or the entrancer like he's really entrancing).

That makes no sense to me.
If they spelled the ability out on the card in full then it would not be allowed in a mono-black Commander deck, but because they used a keyword to save space it is allowed?
~ Tim

I love this description. Like the cows are sponges filled with milk. I can see it all Nick Parks claymation-style with the cow's eyes bugging out momentarily as a giant farmer squeezes it like a squeaky dog toy, and milk shoots out of it.

56287226 wrote:

56735468 wrote:

And no judge will ever give you a game loss for playing snow covered lands.

JVL is not building on what most players consider a budget. His decks are just tier 2 decks with less copies of expensive cards. Half of that is the fault of the way the game is designed, but I think most budget players just want cool decks to play, not just trying to win against better decks more often. Conley is a boss at rogue decks, he could totally write that article good.

I won't make allusions to the author's Conley Woods fanboyism. Oh, wait, I already did? Shoot.

Brian David Marshall is the best and only GOOD player of this game that was widely acknowledged as the writer of BoaB. While this may seem dismissive of past writers, we know that Jacob van Lunen's skills do NOT lie in "budget." This has NOTHING to do with how this game is designed, as BDM proved, and the skill with which BDM managed the task of making Budget decks work in interesting ways implicates the fault not on "design" in the game, but approach of the authors. JVL did not approach the BoaB column with the same perspective as BDM, and should not be faulted for it. I am happy that JVL is getting a column that better suites his skills, so that the readers of the column will not HARP on him constantly for not living up to the bar BDM set. Yes, this is BDM fanboyism.

That said, Conley Woods may also be unable to make budget decks. Just because he can make rogue decks, doesn't mean that those decks will also be "budget." That is, if anything, what JVL's approach aimed for as well, to find niche approaches to common deck types, to fight deck types, specific solutions, and rounded strategies. If you wanted Conley to do BoaB, then I fear you will just get more of JVL, and only the man's fans will keep the forums up. Redefining what "BoaB" means to preserve a column for an author capable of doing what another author also did but which was largely considered NOT true to "BoaB"? Yeah, that won't fly, McFly.

"Possibilities abound, too numerous to count."
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969) "Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)

As far as the benefit of the rest of Magic is concerned, gold cards in Legends were executed perfectly. They got all the excitement a designer could hope out of a splashy new mechanic without using up any of the valuable design space. Truly amazing.
--Aaron Forsythe's Random Card Comment on Kei Takahashi

There are still some twigs and grass shoots that make Goliath look normal-sized, and I guess that's why it's always been hard for me to be fooled. I wish I could say the smaller ones helped, but... I swear they're just mini zombies!

Just chiming in to say that the original Kaja Foglio art is still the best here. Primal Clay is best played a bit silly. No need to have badass dragon clay figures; just goofy expressions on half-formed clay people works.

Just chiming in to say that the original Kaja Foglio art is still the best here. Primal Clay is best played a bit silly. No need to have badass dragon clay figures; just goofy expressions on half-formed clay people works.

Also, it seems to not have been mentioned, but that art actually has a much deeper meaning. If you look with attention in the lower part between the woman and the man, there is a snake. Being it that the card is named "primal clay", it seems very obvious this a reference to Adam and Eve. What makes the glowing, golden hands holding it all actually God's hands.

For autocarding, write [c][/c] with the name of the card inside it.
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I like storm crow because I really like crows in real life, as an animal, and the card isn't terribly stupid, but packs a good deal of nostalgia and also a chunck of the game's history. So it's perhaps one of the cards I have most affection to, but not because "lol storm crow is bad hurr hurr durr".

Although I do assume you deliberately refer to them (DCI) as The Grand Imperial Convocation of Evil just for the purposes of making them sound like an ancient and terrible conspiracy.

Now, now.
1994 doesn't quite qualify as "ancient".

56734518 wrote:

Oh, it's a brilliant plan. You see, Bolas was travelling through shadowmoor, causing trouble, when he saw a Wickerbough Elder with its stylin' dead scarecrow hat. Now, Bolas being Bolas took the awesome hat and he put it on his head, but even with all his titanic powers of magic he couldn't make it fit. He grabbed some more scarecrows, but then a little kithkin girl asked if he was trying to build a toupee. "BY ALL THE POWERS IN THE MULTIVERSE!" he roared, "I WILL HAVE A HAT WORTHY OF MY GLORY." and so he went through his Dark Lore of Doom (tm) looking for something he could make into a hat that would look as stylish on him as a scarecrow does on a treefolk. He thought about the Phyrexians, but they were covered in goopy oil that would make his nonexistant hair greasy. He Tried out angels for a while but they didn't sit quite right. Then, he looked under "e" (because in the Elder Draconic alphabet, "e" for Eldrazi is right next to "h" for Hat) in his Dark Lore of Doom and saw depictions of the Eldrazi, and all their forms.
"THIS SHALL BE MY HAT!" he declared, poking a picture of Emrakul, "AND WITH IT I WILL USHER IN A NEW AGE OF DARKNESS -- ER, I MEAN A NEW AGE OF FASHION!"
And so Nicol Bolas masterminded the release of the Eldrazi.

57864098 wrote:

Rhox War Monk just flips pancakes, and if games have told us anything, it's that food = life.

56747598 wrote:

76973988 wrote:

This thread has gotten creepy. XP

Really?
Really?
The last couple days have been roughly every perverse fetish imaginable, but it only got "creepy" when speculation on Mother of Runes's mob affiliation came up?

Also, it seems to not have been mentioned, but that art actually has a much deeper meaning. If you look with attention in the lower part between the woman and the man, there is a snake. Being it that the card is named "primal clay", it seems very obvious this a reference to Adam and Eve. What makes the glowing, golden hands holding it all actually God's hands.

Yeah, I was going to say. "The clay is actually very small"? The hands are just big. They're glowy golden hands sculpting humanity out of primal clay, seems fairly obvious they belong to God. I don't see the snake though, there's just the lower half of Adam's leg and a couple of swirly lines coming off Eve where she's still forming.

Also, it seems to not have been mentioned, but that art actually has a much deeper meaning. If you look with attention in the lower part between the woman and the man, there is a snake. Being it that the card is named "primal clay", it seems very obvious this a reference to Adam and Eve. What makes the glowing, golden hands holding it all actually God's hands.

Yeah, I was going to say. "The clay is actually very small"? The hands are just big. They're glowy golden hands sculpting humanity out of primal clay, seems fairly obvious they belong to God. I don't see the snake though, there's just the lower half of Adam's leg and a couple of swirly lines coming off Eve where she's still forming.

I do not see a snake either. The artist might have meant the hands to be God sculpting Adam and Eve, but I would not say it is obvious. This is a game about magic, and wizards create living beings all the time.

Also, it seems to not have been mentioned, but that art actually has a much deeper meaning. If you look with attention in the lower part between the woman and the man, there is a snake. Being it that the card is named "primal clay", it seems very obvious this a reference to Adam and Eve. What makes the glowing, golden hands holding it all actually God's hands.

Yeah, I was going to say. "The clay is actually very small"? The hands are just big. They're glowy golden hands sculpting humanity out of primal clay, seems fairly obvious they belong to God. I don't see the snake though, there's just the lower half of Adam's leg and a couple of swirly lines coming off Eve where she's still forming.

It doesn't really take a snake to make the imagery an Abrahamaic "adam-eve" thing. This is basic stuff, though: many religions have a "first man, first woman" crafted from [dust, mud, clay, aether, blood of some giant cow or dragon]. The legends far pre-date records of myths of a garden of Eden or whatever.

"Possibilities abound, too numerous to count."
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969) "Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)

Love the return of the guilds. I also like that they are having 5 in each set and all of them for the last one. The signet colorations are neat along with the new format for the ones that are changed. I especially wonder what they are going to do for Dimir, Boros, and Golgari in terms of mechanics. I doubt Transmute will return and Dredge is even less likely.

Finally, the return draws nigh! I love it already, though I'm not sure with five guilds in each set. This is definitely going to be another flavor than original Ravnica. They most likely did it, so they could show some kind of development by the end of the block. This now is definitely going to be about the destruction of the guilds. Gatecrash most likely denotes to the ten city gates of Ravnica, and "Sinker", well, speaks good enough on its own, for now. Jeez, I so hope you guys don't screw up my favorite setting.

From Mark Rosewater's Tumblr: the0uroboros asked: How in the same set can we have a hexproof, unsacrificable(not a word) creature AND a land that makes it uncounterable. How does this lead to interactive play? I believe I’m able to play my creature and you have to deal with it is much more interactive than you counter my creature.

MaRo: One of the classic R&D stories happened during a Scars of Mirrodin draft. Erik Lauer was sitting to my right (meaning that he passed to me in the first and third packs). At the end of the draft, Erik was upset because I was in his colors (black-green). He said, "Didn't you see the signals? I went into black-green in pack one." I replied, "Didn't you see my signals? I started drafting infect six drafts ago."

From Mark Rosewater's Tumblr: the0uroboros asked: How in the same set can we have a hexproof, unsacrificable(not a word) creature AND a land that makes it uncounterable. How does this lead to interactive play? I believe I’m able to play my creature and you have to deal with it is much more interactive than you counter my creature.

MaRo: One of the classic R&D stories happened during a Scars of Mirrodin draft. Erik Lauer was sitting to my right (meaning that he passed to me in the first and third packs). At the end of the draft, Erik was upset because I was in his colors (black-green). He said, "Didn't you see the signals? I went into black-green in pack one." I replied, "Didn't you see my signals? I started drafting infect six drafts ago."

Also, it seems to not have been mentioned, but that art actually has a much deeper meaning. If you look with attention in the lower part between the woman and the man, there is a snake. Being it that the card is named "primal clay", it seems very obvious this a reference to Adam and Eve. What makes the glowing, golden hands holding it all actually God's hands.

Yeah, I was going to say. "The clay is actually very small"? The hands are just big. They're glowy golden hands sculpting humanity out of primal clay, seems fairly obvious they belong to God. I don't see the snake though, there's just the lower half of Adam's leg and a couple of swirly lines coming off Eve where she's still forming.

It doesn't really take a snake to make the imagery an Abrahamaic "adam-eve" thing. This is basic stuff, though: many religions have a "first man, first woman" crafted from [dust, mud, clay, aether, blood of some giant cow or dragon]. The legends far pre-date records of myths of a garden of Eden or whatever.

For autocarding, write [c][/c] with the name of the card inside it.
[c]Island[/c] = Island
For linking a card to Gatherer without writting the name of said card for readers, use the autocard brackets together with and equal sign and right the name of the real card. Then put the message you want inside the tags, like you would do with autocarding. Like this:
[c=Curse of the Cabal]Captain Never-resolves[/c] = Captain Never-resolves
For using the decklist format, follow this:
[deck]
4* Terramorphic Expanse
4* Evolving Wilds
...
[/deck]
It equals:

I like storm crow because I really like crows in real life, as an animal, and the card isn't terribly stupid, but packs a good deal of nostalgia and also a chunck of the game's history. So it's perhaps one of the cards I have most affection to, but not because "lol storm crow is bad hurr hurr durr".

Although I do assume you deliberately refer to them (DCI) as The Grand Imperial Convocation of Evil just for the purposes of making them sound like an ancient and terrible conspiracy.

Now, now.
1994 doesn't quite qualify as "ancient".

56734518 wrote:

Oh, it's a brilliant plan. You see, Bolas was travelling through shadowmoor, causing trouble, when he saw a Wickerbough Elder with its stylin' dead scarecrow hat. Now, Bolas being Bolas took the awesome hat and he put it on his head, but even with all his titanic powers of magic he couldn't make it fit. He grabbed some more scarecrows, but then a little kithkin girl asked if he was trying to build a toupee. "BY ALL THE POWERS IN THE MULTIVERSE!" he roared, "I WILL HAVE A HAT WORTHY OF MY GLORY." and so he went through his Dark Lore of Doom (tm) looking for something he could make into a hat that would look as stylish on him as a scarecrow does on a treefolk. He thought about the Phyrexians, but they were covered in goopy oil that would make his nonexistant hair greasy. He Tried out angels for a while but they didn't sit quite right. Then, he looked under "e" (because in the Elder Draconic alphabet, "e" for Eldrazi is right next to "h" for Hat) in his Dark Lore of Doom and saw depictions of the Eldrazi, and all their forms.
"THIS SHALL BE MY HAT!" he declared, poking a picture of Emrakul, "AND WITH IT I WILL USHER IN A NEW AGE OF DARKNESS -- ER, I MEAN A NEW AGE OF FASHION!"
And so Nicol Bolas masterminded the release of the Eldrazi.

57864098 wrote:

Rhox War Monk just flips pancakes, and if games have told us anything, it's that food = life.

56747598 wrote:

76973988 wrote:

This thread has gotten creepy. XP

Really?
Really?
The last couple days have been roughly every perverse fetish imaginable, but it only got "creepy" when speculation on Mother of Runes's mob affiliation came up?

Anyway...guilds! Whee! :D I, too, am curious as to how the storyline will be played out, but perhaps there will be more loose affiliations to certain color pairs than the same set of organization that existed before? /shrug

Some of the guild symbols were redesigned, others the same:Gruul is almost completely different, with the "cross" below the flame added rather than what was essentially a burning tree with an eye in it (supposedly often made of poo); Rakdos became a horizontally-divided skull-and-flames; Golgari lost the "Recycle" motif and instead just gets the insect in the middle (but now looks like Dimir a little more);Azorious is partially redesigned, losing the maze= in the middle for concentric rings of "runes";Boros got less of a radiant splay around the fist;Izzet redesigned their dragon (this happens frequently);The Orzhov, Dimir, Simic and Selesnya symbols are the same. These often differ only in the hue changes made to indicate the "two colors" that make the guild identity up.

"Possibilities abound, too numerous to count."
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969) "Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)

Ok, if you actually read the novels, the survival of the guilds was explained at the end of Dissension. Presumably, the world tryed to get by without the guilds for a time, during which the events of Agents of Artifice took place. After two years, in the epilogue of the Dissension novel, a new Guildpact was formed that relied more on legal power rather than magical energy to enforce itself. With powerful arcane force no longer being the power behind the Guildpact, it would be harder to break using it's own laws. The Dimir were removed as an "official" guild and were not a part of the new Guildpact, but of course, they stuck around in reality to be the malevolant force they've always been.

I'm both orderly and rational. I value control, information, and order. I love structure and hierarchy, and will actively use whatever power or knowledge I have to maintain it. At best, I am lawful and insightful; at worst, I am bureaucratic and tyrannical.

Ok, if you actually read the novels, the survival of the guilds was explained at the end of Dissension. Presumably, the world tryed to get by without the guilds for a time, during which the events of Agents of Artifice took place. After two years, in the epilogue of the Dissension novel, a new Guildpact was formed that relied more on legal power rather than magical energy to enforce itself. With powerful arcane force no longer being the power behind the Guildpact, it would be harder to break using it's own laws. The Dimir were removed as an "official" guild and were not a part of the new Guildpact, but of course, they stuck around in reality to be the malevolant force they've always been.

This craps (if you'll forgive the term) on what the Guildpact was there for, in the first place. To magically stop inter-guild conflict -- or rather, the warring of superpowers like an immortal dragon, a league of destructive righteous Templar angels, a chaotic dragon, and the vile machinations of a Illith--Vampire. Quite essentially, it was there to force Szadek and Rakdos into subservience, force the imperiousness of Razia to accept a yoke of forbearance, and prevent line of Arbiters (or, I guess, Isperia) from locking the whole world into a robotic trance of conformity. The Orzhov were there to enforce the rights of the individuals as a group, while the Gruul were to protect the planet from the depredations of the population, and the Simic the inverse (and the Selesnya to find balance between the two).

Without these bindings, these "guilds" would slip into chaos, demons and angels and sphinxes doing ... just whatever. The guildpact was, in almost every way, a prison to lock down superpowers.

Now: Razia is dead leaving the Boros without teeth, Szadek is a ghost and functionless but the House Dimir is still largely a mystery, Savra and the Gorgon triplets are gone and replaced by Savra's brother; Augustin doesn't need to be the Arbiter, they can just appoint a new puppet and likely have; I have no clue why the Conclave dissolved, it was alive and well at the end of Dissension, just that there was disconformity along its perimeter; the Gruul were not respected by nor were respecting the others; Niv-Mizzet supposedly planeswalked and disappeared like a coward, leaving many to suspect he was, in fact, a planeswalker (nope! fooled you!); the Obzedat had machinations in which they enabled certain things to occur aiding in the Simic and Nivvy, but never stepped out of its role as arbiter between the low and the high (as this cuts into its bottom line), which I suppose is no longer a valuable thing as Agyrem is no longer full;

And you are telling me that there are now merfolk on the plane. Not just any merfolk, but one of them became leader of the Simic Combine. I can guess where this is going:

1. Planeswalkers felt that blue-aligned and water-affliliated Vedalken were not good enough, so peppered the place with talking fish; or2. the Simic decided that they needed another blue-aligned, water-affiliated race and abandoned work on perfecting Vedalken for life in the big city and invented merfolk, and felt fish-fins and gills worked much better on dry land than Vedalken; or3. there's just one, either coming from another plane or being engineered, and is trying to create more of its race (last of a house, long bereft of existence, much like Momir Vig himself) by ascending through the ranks of the Combine's arcane and convoluted academic system, years and years of study and beaurocratic red-tape--cutting to finally make it to Professor, then Professor Emeritus, then lastly the leader of the Combine (whew! that only takes DECADES!).

"Possibilities abound, too numerous to count."
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969) "Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)